Four Years of College Should Be Free. And Compulsory.

It's hot take Sunday, I guess. So here's mine.

Let me say this up front. I understand that what I am about to propose is a completely unachievable goal in our current politics. There's no way to do it, certainly not any time soon. Still, I think the idea is correct and sometimes we should just go ahead and state what we think the correct thing is, even if we can't make the correct thing happen. It clarifies the mind. It contributes to The Discourse.

And I think the correct thing is Free, Mandatory, Four Year College. Here's why.

When we make the case for a liberal-arts education, for why students at college shouldn't just get a narrow credential focused on their employment, but rather a broad education that includes a variety of academic disciplines, we tend to make civic arguments. This education will prepare students for citizenship. It will give them the knowledge and critical thinking skills they need to be informed decision makers on complex issues, which is important because our form of government holds that the final decision on these issues should be made by The People.

So why are we only giving these skills to some people?

The idea that only some folks need the full skill set to participate in popular decision making was probably an easier sell back in the mid-twentieth century when we were all more comfortable with top-down leadership and centralized institutions. The huge post WWII expansion of higher education happened when Political Parties were still choosing presidential candidates in literal smoke-filled back rooms. Party primaries, and the idea that ordinary people should choose who the candidates are and not just pick from a list provided by leadership, are barely a thing until the 1970s. Of course we thought it was fine if only some people had civic knowledge back then!

You still hear some echoes of this. During my brief stint in an alt-ac role at an elite SLAC that I will not name there was a lot of talk about how their wonderful small classes and top-tier faculty were "educating the leaders of the future." Made my skin crawl, to be honest.

There is a case to be made that our discarding of top-down institutions was a bad idea. Certainly expertise has been under-rated of late!

But, nonetheless, that discarding has happened. And broader participation of people in decision making has benefits, and those benefits would be even greater if the people engaging in those decisions were better informed and more prepared.

Of course, people currently profiting off people making poorly informed decisions in the public sphere will oppose this idea with furious intensity. Which is why I said we can't implement it anytime soon.

But I fear our current attempts to sell four years of liberal arts education without some radical commitment to the idea that this education matters and matters enough that everyone ought to have it is also doomed. We have retreated to making the case for higher education in terms of job credentials in part, I would argue, because we are more comfortable arguing that some people need education for this job role or that one than we are arguing that some people ought to be fully educated citizens and some should not. Only after students make it to campus do we explain they need to take gen-ed classes to be "well rounded people." The main result of this is that they resent their gen-eds and many of them vaguely suspect that the whole thing is a racket designed to make the credential they were sold more expensive for no reason other than keeping us employed.

Which is why I fear the push for 3 year "bachelor's degrees" streamlined down to just career-path stuff, which is currently winding its way through a variety of paths towards a College Near You will be very enticing to students. Why spend time and money on a general education they don't want and that nobody seems to really think they need (because if they did, why doesn't everyone else need it?).

There are other reasons for general education, of course. Learning things is fun! Having the opportunity to engage in curiosity and learn for learnings sake is pleasurable! But, again, why shouldn't everyone get that then? Why should anyone have to worry that the time they spent in poetry class means they will be out competed by someone else who took a shortcut to the same credential? Let's all relax and take poetry class together.

So yeah, that's the argument. College is a public good so we should make it really public. Something for everybody that we expect everybody to do. That's a radical idea, but then everybody doing K-12 education was a radical idea once upon a time as well!